Trigger Warning: There's a brief mention of suicide and a lot of substance abuse.

On a less serious note, there's also spoilers for The Bride and The Widow. Not the kind that will give the victor away, but one that might hint towards a major character's fate. Next chapter, however, I plan to mention the victor of the Seventy-Second Hunger Games and spoil the whole thing for those of you who didn't heed my warnings. I get that a lot of you might not care about my endless spoiler warnings but some of you might and I don't want to ruin any of my evil, evil plot twists.

Stallie Burton, District 10

"I started out younger

At most everything

All the riches and pleasures

What else could life bring?"

Gram Parsons, Hickory Wind

Stallie Burton was District 10's first victor.

She shouldn't have been the last of District 10's victors left alive.

On the way home from the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games, she lay down in her train carriage, vomiting her guts up and hoping for death to take her. She'd had enough. She'd mentored eighty-seven tributes. She'd outlived them all, even the victors.

They haunt her now, in her final moments. Palomino, her own nephew, who'd fought so hard to get back to his kids only to lose them both to a Quell. Stallie had watched Palomino fall apart but she'd stayed in the Control Centre, let him leave her. How could she abandon District 10's last remaining tribute, Xavier, when he had children of his own?

When she'd returned home, Xavier having been devoured by squirrels, she'd found Palomino with a gun in his hand and a bullet in his brain and realised that she should've given up on Xavier right away. Maybe then she would've been able to keep her nephew alive.

Then there'd been Maia, such a sweet girl, so quiet. She'd halved Stallie's workload and kept herself to herself, never judging her mentor's increasing reliance on alcohol. When the Quell had been announced and Maia had been reaped, Stallie was sure that she'd make it back. When the arena had been a jungle, just like Maia's arena, Stallie had been on the verge of celebration.

But Gloss had put a knife through Stallie's hopes. Maia hadn't even survived the bloodbath. Stallie now wished that she'd volunteered. She wouldn't had minded dying in the Quell but Maia still had so much life in her.

Despite this, as much Palomino's death had shocked her and as disappointing as Maia's had been, at least both had been quick.

Manel was the one Stallie couldn't get out of her head. She'd held the poor boy at arm's length at first. She'd failed his father, Xavier, and his brother, Julio. But then he'd come to her, three years after his victory, begging her for drink and drugs, something to banish the pain. She'd never asked him what had pushed him over the edge and he'd never told her. Either he hadn't been willing to tell her or he'd assumed she'd already known.

He'd reminded her of herself, when she was younger. She was pretty sure that she hadn't been a drinker in her twenties but she could hardly remember the time before she'd first picked up a bottle, hoping for oblivion.

She'd known, from the moment the Quell had been announced, that her new drinking buddy would die. It was only a question of how and Stallie had hoped that it would be quick and painless.

No such luck.

Stallie had watched her district's last other victor be torn apart by a mutt with human eyes and long, green tentacles. He'd died screaming for someone named Fawkes, someone who Stallie had never even heard of. Maybe, if she'd been curious about all the ghosts haunting Manel, she'd have felt betrayed. Maybe she would've been desperate to know who Fawkes was, how they'd been connected to Manel and whether they were even still alive.

But Stallie Burton was too tired to care. Now she just wanted to get Manel's death out of her head. The screams, the sickening noise of limbs being ripped from their sockets, the cannon, when the screams had finally stopped.

She'd failed again. She knew that it was the last time she'd ever failed. A lifetime of heavy drinking was destroying her body and she knew, if she survived, they'd just drag her back to the Control Centre until she mentored another two victors to replace her. It had taken her over fifty years to have two living victors. She wasn't going to wait fifty more.

In Stallie Burton's final moments, the screams began to fade. They were replaced by the wind, a cool breeze on a hot day. She remembered the happiest moment of her life, when she'd climbed to the very top of the oak tree in her parents' garden. It must've been seventy years ago, when she was only five. In that moment, she'd perched on the highest branch of the tree, so far away from her family and their expectations, and there'd been nothing in the world but the rustling leaves beneath her, the endless sky above her and the bright future ahead of her.

She should've known she'd spend seventy years trying to chase that moment. Or, more accurately, ten years trying to chase that moment and sixty years trying to drown out the screams of the girl she'd killed. She'd been so scared, at the top of one of the arena's pines with a strange hand wrapped around her ankle. She'd kicked and kicked until the hand had let go and the other girl had fallen to her death...

Stallie tried to separate the final moments of her games from her precious childhood memory but found that everything blurred together in a thick, alcoholic fog. She died with the wind and the screams blending in her head, howling forever.

I appear to have it in for District 10. We're fifteen chapters in and I've already killed off all of their victors. I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to the victors who survive the rebellion. Aside from the seven confirmed survivors, I'm going to kill off pretty much every other victor, though there are a couple of my OC victors who are stealthy enough to survive the rebellion and antisocial enough to refuse to come out of hiding afterwards. Never fear! I have a couple of AUs planned where the OC victors - and Finnick - are less doomed. I'm just killing everyone off in this universe because I've already killed off my favourite character and I want to start afresh in an AU. Sorry if it ruins the story, knowing that all the characters will be killed off during the rebellion. Many of them will be able to live long and fulfilling lives before then

I also seem to have piled as much angst as possible on the District 10 victors, even by victor standards. I'll cover Palomino, Maia and Manel more in later chapters, but I mentioned them all here because one of the biggest factors behind Stallie just giving up on life is that she let them all die. She probably has the longest and most gruelling mentoring period ever and that really took its toll on her. Before she became one of Panem's least successful mentors, Stallie won her games due to a Hunger Games first - the first truly natural arena. From now on, there is a high likelihood of trees. You have been warned.

We also get a sneak peek at the death of a certain victor from The Bride and The Widow. Manel's just one of those characters that I can't seem to let nice things happen to. They will eventually, I promise. They'll probably happen in an AU. I knew from the start that the mutt-slayer would eventually meet his death at the hands/tentacles of 'The Beast'. After all, it's the death that Catching Fire allocated to the District 10 male victor and Manel was the only District 10 male left when the Quell came around.